Desperate Democrats

Democrats:  Crazy?  Delusional?  or Successful?

The military calls it prepping the battlefield. If you're going to take over a country, you don’t just go in with ground forces.  You first soften things up by taking out industrial centers, intelligence nodes, and air defenses. Propaganda campaigns can also play a critical role.

Reading about the latest Dem strategies, I can only conclude that they believe they have adequately prepped the electoral battlefield. They have poked out the eyes of the voters, clogged our ears with BS, and so disoriented us that we now believe up is down and bad is good.

Senator Schumer is encouraging Democrats to talk about gas prices with their constituents

Democrats are being advised to emphasize high gas prices to their advantage when they go home for a weeklong break next week as they seek to counter GOP criticism levied at the Obama administration. (Politico)

Of course gas prices are higher, and Democrats are to blame!
Petroleum is a dollar-denominated commodity, so as the value of the dollar falls, the price of oil and gasoline climb. Thank you President Obama, Boy Wonder Geithner, and Big Ben Bernanke.

Obama restricting drilling permits on land and off-shore served to lower the supply, resulting in higher gas prices, and the democrats applauded.

Schumer and the dems are urging the president to tap the strategic oil reserved in order to drive gasoline prices down. This is encouraging because it demonstrates that these lefties at least understand the concept of supply and demand and the affect it has on prices.

Now if we can just get them to take the next leap, and and break down the regulatory wall that prevents new refineries from being built. While they are at it, they could also allow more drilling in the US.   If they believe unleashing the strategic reserve will lower prices, then they must agree that pumping more oil will have the same effect.  The Louisiana Lieutenant Governor, who just abandoned the Democratic party to become a Republican, cited Dem opposition to drilling as his reason for switching.

For the other side of the Demagogic party propaganda, see the Oil & Gas Financial Journal article, Why the Oil Companies Make Bad Villains.  Among other things, you will learn that while software companies make on average a profit of 17 cents on every dollar spent, the oil industry makes a mere 8 cents.  Why aren't the demagogic Democrats going after Big Software?

Dems Hope Union Battles Lure Back Independents

Are they crazy? The public unions have pitted themselves against the lower-wage taxpayer and it’s a zero-sum fight over who is more entitled to the loot--those who earned it or government bureaucrats.  Government workers enrich themselves by taking money directly from the pockets of the taxpaying citizen voter.  I don't know how they think this is going to work in their favor.

Either they're desperate or they are dangerously delusional.  Either way, if the GOP can keep it on the rails and actually roll out a coherent agenda, they might just get somewhere.

A Progressive Doomsday Device

Progressives are already snickering in giddy anticipation of the voter backlash against GOP budget cuts…

Read along with me what this little handmaiden of big government has to say...

The politics become volatile and incendiary when the rubber of deficit reduction meets the road of pain and suffering imposed on individual voters. The polls today are irrelevant. Public opinion will shift in dramatic and unpredictable ways once the happy drunk of deficit-reduction promises brings the hangover headache of deciding which voters will suffer what pain. (Brent Budowsky – The Hill)

Notice how the statist commentator steals the “drunk” analogy from those who apply it to big spenders, and now uses it against those wanting to stop the profligacy? Neat rhetorical trick.

But this is the operative part of the quote: “…deciding which voters will suffer what pain.”

We're All Crack Whores Now
That is the beautiful trap progressives built into their grand scheme. Spread it around, hand the government-issued crack cocaine out to everyone. Middle class parents whose children eat subsidize school lunches. Retirees with hundreds of thousands in retirement nesteggs who are conditioned to the idea of a monthly government check. Government-subsidized train travel. Education grants and cheap student loans…

It’s all bound so tightly, any scalpel wielding politician is bound to draw blood.  We’re all hooked. We’re crack whores who break out in the cold sweats every time we contemplate escaping Uncle Sugar the pimp daddy.

In the cold war movie Dr Strangelove, a rogue Air Force general launches bombers with no way to call them back in the hopes of nuking the Russkies before they can retaliate. His plan is foiled when the Russians declare they have a previously undisclosed “doomsday machine,” that will automatically launch all their nukes, there’s no way to stop it.

Statists have done the same with their progressive programs. Knife-wielders in green eyeshades find themselves lost in a funhouse maze, nowhere to turn, nowhere to cut where someone won’t scream in agony. The progressives have turned the goodie-dispensing federal government into a giant doomsday machine that will blow up in the faces of anyone trying to dismantle it. The big spenders can just sit back and chuckle as the slashers piss off more and more voters.

Defunding the Democratic Party

As the teachers unions abandon our kids and their schools to swarm Madison like a throbbing horde of third-world lunatics, liberal columnist Kevin Drum makes an excellent point.  He complains that Republicans who are dismantling government programs and cutting spending are “defunding the Democratic party.”

A brilliant observation!  Democrats have been buying votes with our tax dollars for the better part of 80 years now.  It’s time to put a stop to it.

MSNBC – Republican Cuts

Eat Yourself Thin, and Other Liberal Ideas

The Democrats, like a Florida election judge looking for an Al Gore vote, say they see signs of hope in the economy.  They are delusional.

The first delusion is that government can "create jobs."  Actually, it can, but government jobs do not spur economic growth.  If it were otherwise, all government would have to do is hire every last unemployed person and the problem would be solved.  Failed states like Illinois and California appear to have actually tried this strategy...

Democrats are just dying for another stimulus, this time it's "for the children," they tell us, when actually it's a $50 billion payoff to state governments and the teachers unions.  Can't they see that the taxpayer money they've blown so far has been wasted?

Uncertainty Kills Job Growth
We don't need more "stimulus." Government needs to remove the uncertainty that is causing employers to keep their money stashed away instead of using it to hire people:

Today investors and employers are certain that uncertainties are multiplying.

They are uncertain about when interest rates will rise, and by how much. They do not know how badly the economy will be burdened by the expiration, approximately 200 days from now, of the Bush tax cuts on high earners — aka investors and employers.

They know the costs of ObamaCare will be higher than was advertised, but not how much higher. They do not know the potential costs of cap-and-trade and other energy policies.

They do not know if "card check" — abolition of the right of secret ballot elections in unionization decisions — will pass, or how much the economy will be injured by making unions more muscular. (George Will)

Spending your way to prosperity is right up there with "Eat Yourself Thin" and "Smoke Your Way to Good Health"

The original sin—and it was nearly global—was to revive the Keynesian economic model that had last cracked up in the 1970s, while forgetting the lessons of the long prosperity from 1982 through 2007. The Reagan and Clinton-Gingrich booms were fostered by a policy environment for most of that era of lower taxes, spending restraint and sound money.(WSJ Keynesian Dead End)

Europe realizes this now.  Germany rejects further "stimulus" spending, Britain is crafting an austerity budget, and they've chopped up the credit cards Greece used to spend its way to financial ruin.

But the Obama White House blithely marches on.  Maybe they're hoping to bend the reality curve...

Obama is all They Got

The Democratic party is a putrid, pustular, bloated and rotting corpse

We knew it two years ago, but as a sagging, aging movie star struggles to maintain her good looks, the party hung its fortunes on the handsome Barack Obama.  He was all they had.  They are intellectually and morally bankrupt.  They slept their way to the top with Wall Street; their mantle of virtue is now a see-through nightie. 


Party Affiliation is now a dead heat.  Which is no surprise.  As Obama has fallen, so have the Democrats.

I predicted this on May 19th 2009, speculating on the reason for Democratic dominance:

What explains the continued Democratic dominance?

Their headliners are grotesque freaks: (Pelosi, Frank, Kucinich), angry jackasses (James Webb, Al Franzen), criminals (Rangel, Balgojevich, Jefferson) or grumpy anonymi (Harry Reid, Carl Levin)

The states and cities they control are putrid sinkholes of corruption and economic collapse: California, Detroit, New York, DC

So what explains the Democrats' success?

President Barack Obama. He's all they got. If the bloom falls off that handsome, teleprompter-articulate rose, they're done, which explains why the press is straining so hard for him against the forces of reality.

America thought it had voted for a pragmatic, moderate philosopher king.  Instead, we got a smart-ass punk who sarcastically and publicly calls out his enemies (the list of which is growing faster than Nixon's).  The man never misses a preachable moment, and now the bloom has fallen off the rose.

Live by BS, die by BS...

Government Happy Talk has left Us Angry and In Debt

 What is the Purpose of Government?

The purpose of government?  Progressives have an (unsurprising) answer in this good article in the Times Online.  (Enjoy it while you can Rupert Moloch will start charging later this year.)

I have always maintained that Big Government Progressives are not evil.  They just think they know what's best for the rest of us.  They remain restless and mischievous until they have us all yolked to the state and marching in lockstep.

This sums up their ruling philosophy pretty well:

"once basic needs are met, governments should abandon a narrow focus on economic growth or gross domestic product (GDP). They should, instead, define collective wellbeing and seek policies that promote happiness."

WRONG!  This may work in England or San Francisco, but ordinary Americans bristle at government defining transcendent concepts like "Wellbeing" for them.  How do you promote the collective happiness of 300 million diverse individuals?  Democrats have proven this to be a fool's errand.

The author neatly dispatches such silliness, and for good reason.  We are autonomous beings, each pursuing our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in our own way.

Sometimes, Happiness is being left the hell alone...

Democratic Party: Overlawyered

Why do Republicans tend to look to the free market for solutions while Democrats insist on passing more laws? 

David Warren laments...

...the tactics of "legislation by litigation" ... should be profoundly anathematic to a free society.

By increments, the need for lawyers has been extended to every aspect of human life, and the law schools themselves have metastatically expanded. In a sense, our entire society has been criminalized, by lawyers adding to myriad laws that impinge not only on criminals, but on everybody.

Democrats are Stinky with Lawyers

This is a point brought home to me by an amusing item a friend forwarded this week, comparing Democrat to Republican party in the United States.

The Democrat leadership is all lawyers, and has been for some time. Barack Obama, lawyer; Michelle Obama, lawyer; Hillary Clinton, lawyer; Bill Clinton, lawyer; Harry Reid, lawyer; Nancy Pelosi, lawyer; and so forth.

All Democrat presidential candidates since 1984, lawyers -- except Al Gore, who somehow failed to graduate from law school.

  Republicans are more diverse

Compare, if you will, the Republican leadership over the last while, in White House and Congress.

The last Republican lawyer to make president was Gerald Ford. Instead: movie actor, spy chief, businessman, successively. Last election: an old soldier, and a PTA lady.

Look back at the leaders of the so-called "Republican revolution" in Congress: Newt Gingrich, history professor; Tom Delay, pest exterminator; Dick Armey, economist; Bill Frist, heart surgeon. (And note what the Democrat lawyers did to get rid of them.)

In a nation of hammers, every problem looks like a nail...
In a government ruled by lawyers, every citizen looks like a criminal, and every problem can be solved by one more law...

Crony Capitalism

"The stereotype of Wall Street being Republican is decades out of date."

Oso, a liberal commenter (a thinking liberal), recently observed here that from his perspective, Obama so far looks a lot like Bush.  I had to agree.  Both men are statists, freely mingling government and business in an orgy of money and special favors.

Big Business has no Ideology but Profit

Michael Barone writes about how crony capitalism has thrived under the Obama administration, continuing and expanding the unholy business-government embrace of the Bush administration.

Lobbyists, reports the Center for Responsive Politics, had a record 2009 in Barack Obama's Washington. Despite candidate Obama's promises to shun them, they raked in $3,470,000,000.

Goldman employee contributions to Democrats in 2008 ranked second only to those employed by the University of California. JPMorgan Chase's employees ranked No. 7. The stereotype of Wall Street being Republican is decades out of date.

Barone Describes Crony Capitalism in a Nutshell:

The government and the United Auto Workers own General Motors and Chrysler, which aren't likely to pay back their billions in TARP money any time soon, if ever. Meanwhile the government tells Americans to stop driving Toyotas.

Big Business has been busy lobbying Big Government for "reforms" that serve big companies' interests. Wal-Mart backs a health care mandate, Philip Morris shapes tobacco regulation, General Electric is setting up a joint venture to trade carbon offsets (wasn't that Enron's line of work back in the day?).

Statism is a disease that strikes both Democratic and Republican governments, and crony capitalism is a bipartisan sport. Until their is bipartisan voter anger, the games will continue to bleed us dry.